Hindu PantheonCity
Varanasi
The spiritual capital of India, situated on the banks of the Ganges, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities and sacred to Shiva.
About Varanasi
Kashi on the Ganga
Varanasi (Kashi) is Shiva's city in the Skanda Purana and in Mahabharata geography: a crossing-place where dying is said to free. The Ganga's ghats are later urban form; the holiness is older in the Puranic lists of tirthas. The claim is soteriological: this is where the god of destruction keeps a home on the river. Historical Buddhism and later Mughal layers sit on the same bend. The mythic city is the tirtha, not the modern skyline.
On the map
Varanasi among other places of the Hindu Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Skanda Purana, Kashi Khanda (traditional attribution)
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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